The number of tasks that nowadays are accomplished by using unmanned aerial vehicles is rising across many civil applications, including agriculture. Thus, this work aims at providing the reader with an overview of the agronomical use of unmanned aerial vehicles. The work starts with a historical analysis of the use of aircrafts in agriculture, as pioneers of their use in modern precision agriculture techniques, currently applied by a high number of users. This survey has been carried out by providing a classification of the vehicles according to their typology and main sensorial and performance features. An extensive review of the most common applications and the advantages of using unmanned aerial vehicles is the core of the work. Finally, a brief summary of the key points of the legislation applicable to civil drones that could affect to agricultural applications is analyzed.

This paper describes the design, construction and validation of a mobile sensory platform for greenhouse monitoring. The complete system consists of a sensory system on board a small quadrotor (i.e., a four rotor mini-UAV). The goals of this system include taking measures of temperature, humidity, luminosity and CO₂ concentration and plotting maps of these variables. These features could potentially allow for climate control, crop monitoring or failure detection (e.g., a break in a plastic cover). The sensors have been selected by considering the climate and plant growth models and the requirements for their integration onboard the quadrotor. The sensors layout and placement have been determined through a study of quadrotor aerodynamics and the influence of the airflows from its rotors. All components of the system have been developed, integrated and tested through a set of field experiments in a real greenhouse. The primary contributions of this paper are the validation of the quadrotor as a platform for measuring environmental variables and the determination of the optimal location of sensors on a quadrotor.

Forest firefighting missions encompass multiple tasks related to prevention, surveillance, and extinguishing. This work presents a complete survey of firefighters on the current problems in their work and the potential technological solutions. Additionally, it reviews the efforts performed by the academy and industry to apply different types of robots in the context of firefighting missions. Finally, all this information is used to propose a concept of operation for the comprehensive application of drone swarms in firefighting. The proposed system is a fleet of quadcopters that individually are only able to visit waypoints and use payloads, but collectively can perform tasks of surveillance, mapping, monitoring, etc. Three operator roles are defined, each one with different access to information and functions in the mission: mission commander, team leaders, and team members. These operators take advantage of virtual and augmented reality interfaces to intuitively get the information of the scenario and, in the case of the mission commander, control the drone swarm.

This paper presents a collaborative system made up of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and an aerial robot, which is applied to real-time frost monitoring in vineyards. The core feature of our system is a dynamic mobile node carried by an aerial robot, which ensures communication between sparse clusters located at fragmented parcels and a base station. This system overcomes some limitations of the wireless networks in areas with such characteristics. The use of a dedicated communication channel enables data routing to/from unlimited distances.